Marjorie shushan may be a member of the last generation to have an unhyped, un-merchandised childhood, a slow, richly quiet youth of the kind we read about with delicious nostalgia for experiences we never had. “My 16-yearold granddaughter asked me once what kind of rules and regulations I had when I was growing up,” she says. “I said I didn’t have any because we didn’t drive until we were 18. We didn’t do anything except go to the drugstore, hang out and go to movies. My mother told me what time to be home, and I was home at that time.”

Her father manufactured soda fountains. The family had a soda fountain at home in Philadelphia and had a marble quarry in Vermont whence came those highly polished countertops before Corian was so much as an electrochemical impulse in a DuPont chemist’s brain. “When my mother wanted a lamp, my father would make it from the quarry. We’re now reselling all those things. You know, if you wait a generation or two, it all comes back. I go into stores selling things from the ’30s and ’40s, and I’ll look around and think, Hmm, I wonder if that belonged to us? No matter what my mother wanted, it was made of marbleif she would allow it.”

Kalef Alaton had seen her work and exploded with enthusiasm. She says he told her, “ ‘You need to use your talent.’ I said, ‘I’m skiing right now, but if you get something I’d be interested in, I’ll work with you.’ ”

When Shushan was a teenager, interior design was far from her mind. “I don’t think I had any idea that I was going to become a designer. If I thought I was going to be anything, it would have been a designer of clothesthat was my love,” she says.

There were other things on her mind in those years. “I was interested in the arts, in artists and paintings. I was also very interested in boys and anything they thought was interesting.”

In high school she got herself jobs in clothing shops, but they didn’t work out. “My father didn’t think that women should work. So every time I’d get a job, he’d go in and pay them off to get me fired.” The shopkeepers, she remembers, “wouldn’t say anything. But I think after a while I put it together. My father was a very old-fashioned person.”

Paternal control was not relaxed with Shushan’s graduation from high school at the age of 17. Although she left Philadelphia for Emerson College in Boston, her father, she says, “was very much against my leaving home or living anywhere other than home. My mother made him allow me to go, but that was the only year I could be gone. I came back and went to the University of Pennsylvania.”

There, Shushan met her former husband, who was on his way to Harvard Law School. And so she found herself back in Boston, where, she says, “I don’t remember doing much, because we had only one car.”

The next stop in her life was New Orleans, where her husband’s family lived. He returned to practice law while she raised their two daughters, who, she adds, “grew up to be extremely independent”something that clearly pleases her.

Still a young woman when her daughters were off to college, Shushan began spending time in Aspen, where people who had seen what she’d done with her own home asked her to help them with theirs. “I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that, because I was busy going skiing at the time,” she recalls.

That might have been that, except that her husband’s law office needed design help. “I didn’t really want to do that,” she says. “So we hired someone. But my husband didn’t like what they did. Then he hired somebody else and fired them too. Finally I said, ‘I can’t take this anymoreI’ll do it, I’ll do it.’ ”

The effort was successful, but not without its ups and downs. “He wanted his office to look like his home. But then I had to do the secretary’s office, the reception room and the conference room, which I didn’t have a lot of knowledge about. But I did pull it off. Everyone who saw it loved it,” she says. At about the same time, the English designer David Hicks had introduced a line of fabrics and carpets, which she used, much to her husband’s dismay. “He told me, ‘I’ve never seen a pattern on the floor. I think everything else is fine, but let’s get rid of that.’ And I said, ‘If we get rid of that, you get rid of me, too.’ So he went forward with it and got a lot of compliments. One thing led to another, and I started doing a little bit of work. I got coaxed into it.”

Her design for her husband’s office was published, and almost without knowing it, Marjorie Shushan had become an interior designer.

Then she met Kalef Alaton, the late Los Angeles-based designer, who had seen some of her work and exploded with enthusiasm. She remembers that he told her, “‘You need to go to work. You need to use your talent. You need to let it be seen.’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know. I’m skiing right now, but if I ever get a job that you’d be interested in, I’ll give you a call. And if you get something that you think I’d be interested in, I’ll work with you.’” Looking back, Shushan admits, “I probably was a bit lazy about it and probably too busy with my own life. I was off doing other things.” Alaton did give her a call to help him on a job, and they began to work together. His effect on her was so deep, she has written that his “presence is forever with me. I had complete faith in his enormous knowledge of the arts, and, given a problem of choice, I still ask, ‘What would Kalef do?’”

He remains in her memory as “very quiet, very reserved,” a “very elegant man,” and she makes a parallel observation about her own work, that it is “not disruptive, not disturbing. That’s the way I am. I’m not loud; I’m not boisterous.” Her practice might be described as boutique. “I’m a small office,” she explains. “I have an average of about five people. I take projects that interest me and mainly clients with whom I feel comfortable. I don’t like a lot of pressure. I love what I do, or I wouldn’t be doing this.”

Some of her jobs, however, are anything but boutique. The designer is currently working on a 38,000-square-foot house with no fewer than 19 bathrooms.

In summing up her career and her years working with Alaton, Marjorie Shushan reflects, “It’s a wonderful story. It was being at the right place at the right time. I’d like to say I took advantage of the opportunity, but Kalef pushed me to take it.”